Vanessa Friedman, one of the most distinct and acclaimed voices in fashion, never intended on being a fashion writer. From studying history and creative writing at Princeton to her brief post-grad stint working for a law firm in Paris, Friedman’s path to her current role as the Fashion Director and Chief Fashion Critic at The New York Times has been an unconventional one.
Friedman’s list of bylines include publications such as InStyle UK, Elle, Vogue, Vanity Fair, The Economist, The New Yorker, Financial Times, and Entertainment Weekly. In her role at The New York Times, Friedman divides her energy between criticizing collections that come down the runway each season and directing the fashion coverage of the newspaper by assigning and editing projects that give a holistic view into the vast industry of fashion — an industry that’s reach touches every person on the planet.
In her visit to SCAD, I was able to sit down with the acclaimed journalist, where we discussed everything from interning to trends to the giant inflatable orgy depiction at the Diesel SS23 show.
NICHOLSON BAIRD: So I know you talked about this yesterday a bit – You were at Princeton and studying history. I read somewhere you wrote a novel?
VANESSA FRIEDMAN: So I was minoring in creative writing because I really was interested in writing and so I wrote a historical novel as my thesis. Weirdly, I’m now on the Advisory Committee for the History Department, and I was there having dinner and my old thesis advisor was there, who’s a German economic historian, and he was like, “I can’t believe we let you do that.” And I think it was just that at Princeton at the time, as long as you produced how you would do something, as opposed to asking if you could do it, they were fine. So I wrote a novel about the Weimar Republic and the Bauhaus.
Baird: That is super exciting. And then you started at Vanity Fair, correct?
Friedman: Then I went to Paris and worked for a law firm, which I think no longer exists, for about two years, and then I came back to New York, and I worked briefly at a literary magazine called Grand Street, which was run by Jean Stein. It was run out of her apartment in The Dakota. And because I was the editorial assistant, my job was to come in in the morning, turn on all the lights, and make coffee, and then Jean and her Nobel Prize winning physicist partner would arrive in their bathrobes and have coffee! So I did that for three months, then I went to Vanity Fair. And then I could order the coffee.
Baird: I know you said yesterday, you just kind of ended up at Vanity Fair. You were saying that you didn’t ever think about ending up in fashion, but obviously, Vanity Fair is a huge fashion publication,
Friedman: It didn’t used to be that way. When Tina Brown ran it, it focused more on Hollywood and power. It was really about power and money, honestly. So they did occasional stories on fashion, but they didn’t have fashion in the way they have it now. Even under Graydon Carter they didn’t have as much of it, but now that Radhika Jones reports to Anna Wintour, it has become more fashion-focused. I think just because the economics of magazines have become so challenged, having more fashion in a magazine like that makes sense.
The thing about Vanity Fair is that it ran and still runs big text stories with thousands of words. And so if you’re interested in words, which I was, like how stories and how narratives are shaped, it was a very good place to learn.
Baird: That’s awesome. Post-pandemic, especially in the past year as things have really started to open up, what have you seen that’s the biggest difference in fashion?
Friedman: I think what I’ve seen is that what we expected to happen, which is that we would come out of this, and it would be the 1920s Redux, the 2020s would be similar, and we would all be dancing on tables and drinking champagne. That hasn’t happened. It hasn’t happened because the pandemic is not entirely over and because there’s so much global uncertainty and I think you see that reflected in fashion. There are some party dresses, but then there is some very protective dressing, and there’s still a lot of comfort dressing, and people are still nervous about how they’re spending their money. So you see a little bit of everything, but not really necessarily a lot of one thing.
Baird: That makes sense. So, you are the fashion critic of fashion critics.
Friedman: I’m not sure I would say that.
Baird: Then I will say it! I think something that I’ve noticed is that there’s less actual criticism in fashion criticism. So I want to know why you think that fashion criticism, criticism, is such an integral part of the industry as a whole.
Friedman: For the same reason that criticism in any industry is useful, whether it’s art or dance or film. It helps create a frame for thinking about what you’re seeing and if you want to think about it. If you get dressed, understanding the role that your clothes can play is actually a useful thing. Understanding when you walk into a store, why you’re seeing what you’re seeing, and why you might make one choice or not another choice is a useful thing. Ideally, fashion criticism helps with that.
I also think it helps in the other direction, So that designers understand how their clothes are seen. Once you put something into the world, it doesn’t matter what your personal connection to it is, the whole backstory that you wrote in your head about your grandmother or the museum show you went to, or your relationship with Yves Klein Blue — once it’s out there, you don’t control it anymore. So understanding how it’s seen by people who are looking at it from a different context, I think, is actually very valuable. Understanding how it’s seen by the people who might wear it is valuable. And I hope that what I write is taken in that vein, although I’m not sure it always is.
Baird: With Tik Tok, because of the way that the algorithm is, everyone gets to have an opinion and it gets to be broadcasted. For anyone who wants to be a fashion writer and have a voice that is not just a part of that mass of chronically online people, how do you think they can set themselves apart from that crowd?
Friedman: You know, I think knowledge and context really helps. When you talk about the end of criticism or the shrinking amount of criticism, I think it’s because a lot of that has morphed into just knee-jerk reactionism because of social media. So things have become very much, “I like this. I don’t like it. I’d wear this. I wouldn’t wear this. That’s cute.” Obviously, there’s nothing wrong with that, but I think at the moment, there’s much more of that because that is how most people present on social media — particularly the people we now call influencers. So I think if you actually take the time to understand the antecedents to a garment, like the Chanel to Yohji to Junya, those lines, then you bring something more to the table and distinguish yourself.
Baird: Awesome. Okay, I touched on this a bit, but your voice in fashion criticism is super direct and that’s something you’ve become acclaimed for. Within actual fashion criticism, do you think that criticism is struggling due to the amount of advertisers and the fact that print is really difficult these days?
Friedman: The shrinking number of us! The shrinking, aging fashion! I think it’s partly due to a lot of newspapers going away, and newspapers are the place where a lot of criticism resides because magazines play a different role in the media ecosystem. And that’s too bad and just a function of general economics and how people want to receive their media. It’s partly because attention spans are shrinking, so writing even a 1000-word review is longer than most people want. They want Axios bullet points. But I think there is still a market for it, and hopefully, there will remain one.
Baird: In an interview with AnOther Magazine, you said, “an independent press is important for every part of society, whether it’s political or professional.” And I guess I’m curious about how you think that fashion criticism ties into the importance of an independent press in general.
Friedman: Well, it doesn’t have to be criticism. It can also be reporting. A lot of the investigative stuff we do about supply chains and production and how workers are treated is really important. We did a story that I edited about the Italian shadow production market, which are women in Italy doing home-work, I guess you call it. It’s just suddenly been outsourced to them by factories for luxury brands, and they’re being paid a pittance at an hourly wage to sew buttons on a Fendi coat or do stitching or embroidery. I think letting the brands know, even if they knew before, that this is now public, and you can’t do that, and that’s not okay, is really important. That’s part of a free press. There’s this idea that fashion is always frivolous and fluffy. And I don’t think that’s true when it comes to really any aspect of it. Whether it’s how we shop, or why we buy what we buy, why we wear what we wear, or the way that this stuff is made and sold and the actual industry, which is enormous and touches billions of lives.
Baird: Yeah, and it holds people accountable. What do you think makes someone a really great critic?
Friedman: I think being able to think deeply about your topic. Respecting the actors involved, respecting the history and understanding the context. Respecting your reader and loving language.
Baird: There’s a lot of discourse online about Gen Z style. A lot of people say that because of such a fast trend turnover rate online, it’s leading to this huge mishmash of trends. People now say that Gen Z is trendless, which I don’t really buy. From your point of view, how would you define what you’ve seen in the past five years as Gen Z fashion?
Friedman: I do think Gen Z is very interested in the 80s and 90s. Which is normal — the way the world dressed when they were kind of coming into it, but not really able to participate in it. I think that happens with every generation, and it’s just speeded up slightly. I think we’re all kind of trendless to that extent, in the sense that people are getting their information from so many different places that there is no single kind of thematic, overarching moment. I also think that mega-trends or sort of generation-defining trends tend to be seen in retrospect. So when we talk about the 80s, we’re really talking about the later 80s because things take a while to gel. Often the later 80s and early 90s, that’s actually [what we know as] the 80s. So I think it will be a while till we look back and sort of have enough distance to say, “that actually was the way this group of kids dressed or this group of adults dressed.” Or maybe we never will!
Baird: So this is another thing I’ve been really interested in. After Coperni, Fabrican, Bella Hadid, obviously, the immediate reaction online is, “Holy shit. Bella Hadid. Like, look at her.” Which, yeah, look at her, you know? I feel like once fashion people started to metabolize it, their first thing that they said was, “Well, this is marketing! It’s not fashion, it’s marketing!” Which to me was like, duh. What do you think Fashion Week is? The point is to make a lot of money, so that part to me is really obvious. I’ve just been mulling it over in my brain and I’m curious as to what you think is the distinction between a marketing stunt and just great fashion?
Friedman: Great fashion should be great marketing, because if it’s great, you discover it and you want to buy it or at least be inspired by it. I thought that was more than a marketing stunt, because I feel like it raised really interesting questions about what is fabric and what is design? How do you define that? So I don’t think it was just a gimmick. I think it was received that way by a lot of the world, which is fine. But if you really spend some time with it, it did sort of challenge a lot of received notions, like what is value? Who is a creator or what does it mean to be a designer? Does designing a spray-on fiber make you a designer? Is it empowering the individual to be a designer? And if so, what does that mean for people who are schooled in design? So I think it was more than marketing. But I also think I’m in the minority in that, because it involved Hadid and because it was so viral. The gimmicky aspect of it risks overshadowing the rest of it and it’s kind of on us then to raise those questions and remind people that there might be actually more to this than what at first meets the eye.
Baird: That makes me really happy to hear from you. I was so excited about it and then I felt almost embarrassed the following week because people were saying, “oh, it’s a gimmick, it’s marketing,” but I thought it was a moment.
Friedman: I think it’s also on the designers to make it clear too, they can contextualize it in bigger questions and [Coperni] kind of didn’t.
Baird: Also the rest of the collection…
Friedman: The rest of the collection wasn’t that good.
Baird: Then it gets a bit tricky! I’m very curious to know about the Spring 2023 Diesel show. 5000 people in attendance, 1600 of them were students. That’s a lot of people and I want to know your opinion on it.
Friedman: I think they did it very well. Often the logistics of that kind of a presentation are problematic for the professional part of the audience who’s there to do their job. You saw that in Paris with the Balmain festival when Olivier Rousteing did the same thing by inviting 6000 people out to this stadium on the outskirts of Paris and it was a total zoo. It was an hour late, so it was 10pm before it started and we were all having meltdowns because it was gonna take 45 minutes to get back to Paris and then you had to do your work. I was just thinking, this is not professional. Have a party for your fan base and then have a presentation during the day and let me come see it. I just want to see the clothes. And also we were really far away from the runway because it was in the middle of the stadium floor, so I couldn’t really see it. So that, to me, was not a logistically successful experience.
But the Diesel show, which was during the day, started relatively on time and I could really see the clothes. I think it’s great to bring the population in and I think it’s great to bring students in. It also makes sense with the story of Diesel and what it stands for and the people they hope to reach. So I also appreciate that. I think if you’re going to pull a stunt like that, having it actually be a coherent political position is important. And because then it doesn’t feel like marketing. Although still, blown-up giant inflatable orgy people?
Baird: A Guinness World Record! Wasn’t the invitation a?
Friedman: A butt plug, yeah.
Baird: I wasn’t gonna say it so I was waiting for you to.
Friedman: I think half the people were like, “What is this?”
Baird: While we’re on it, what are your thoughts on Diesel? Because I think young people especially respond to what Martens does there.
Friedman: He’s an incredibly talented designer. I always liked Y-Project and was super interested in it. I was really amazed by what he did at Gaultier Couture, that was just beautiful and not like anything he’d done at Y-Project. I think what he’s doing at Diesel is really smart and also really beautiful and interesting. Especially in terms of sustainability and the way he is upcycling denim and pushing it in every aspect of the business including store design and stuff like that. So I have a lot of respect for them and I never really took Diesel seriously as a fashion brand until now. I think now they really are behind what Glenn [Martens] is doing. I think he was smart in his negotiations with them in saying, “I want this not just to be this little layer of fashion on top of an enormous company, but to be part of the whole thing.”
Baird: Because I feel like I see Martens run throughout the brand.
Friedman: Yeah, I think it’s a much bigger role than it has been in the past.
Baird: It’s really interesting. In addition to what you wrote in your “Nakedness” piece – what in addition to that do you think is going to be big for spring?
Friedman: So this isn’t necessarily for spring, and it’s not necessarily anything specific, but I believe very strongly that the world of sports and the world of fashion are becoming one thing in the way that the world of Hollywood and the world of fashion did about a decade ago. That is going to be a really important driver of the industry going forward. Essentially, they both are obsessed with community, values, experiences, and brand building. I think they’re getting closer and closer together. Every athlete wants to have a fashion line and every fashion brand wants to work with a sports team. I think it’s going to be a huge trend going forward.
Baird: So for my last big question, I would love to know what the future of fashion means to Vanessa Friedman.
Friedman: I think it’s just an expression of identity. So it has a perennial future, right? People always need clothes, and they always need more clothes than “need” would imply. You see that all the time because whenever terrible things happen, whenever there are crises, the industry that survives is fashion. People have been decorating themselves since they were people since they walked on two feet. There’s just something incredibly human about it. And so I think that is its future.
Special thanks to Dirk Standen for making this interview possible
Interview conducted by Nicholson Baird.
Graphic by Fai McCurdy.